'Losing the Constitution': Authoritarianism expert explains why we can't count on the media or GOP to stop Trump's damage

In an interview with Slate, historian Timothy Snyder said Americans have their work cut out for them if they hope to unseat President Donald Trump and stop the damage he is doing to the country.

Speaking with journalist Issac Chotnier, Snyder, who wrote "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century," said Trump has been given a helping hand by the media which has been overwhelmed by his impulsiveness and brashness when it comes to getting what he wants.

Asked, "Are there things, either in terms of the way the Trump administration has behaved or in terms of the way people have failed to respond, that has made you think things are worse than you thought?" Snyder had mixed feelings about the nedia.

"I guess the main thing would be media normalization. On the one hand, the New York Times and the Washington Post have been sharp for the most part. They seem to recognize what the stakes are. What I find interesting about them and about a bunch of other outlets is that people call them the mainstream, but they’re totally not the mainstream anymore," he responded. "Of course, CNN speaks in many voices. Fox does too for that matter, but in general, people who work in television media have a hard time getting out of the daily cycle and therefore their tendency is very strongly to normalize. To imagine that whatever happened today is somehow OK. That, I think, probably has to change."

He added, "It’s more a matter of being able to think not just about today, because once you think about today, then you don’t have the distance to know that things are truly weird or truly unusual, and you’ll tend to distance. You’ll see moments on television where something very strange happens, but they just normalize. That’s probably the thing that worries me the most."

As for stopping Trump, the historian said it requires a multi-pronged approach.

"In order for this to be stopped, there has to be unconventional activism," he explained. "Americans have to do the kind of things they haven’t been used to doing because the system that we’re used to is now precisely in question. The Democrats also have to resist. That’s a necessary but not a sufficient condition. There has to be the conventional resistance. Then some elements of the Trump electorate have to shift. Maybe not most of it, but some of it has to realize that OK, this wasn’t just a symbolic moment."

Snyder then warned the U.S. is in danger of seeing an autocrat overwhelm our Constitutional government.

"We may actually be losing the Constitution, which I think a number of folks who voted for Trump would actually care about," he remarked. "I think a certain amount of the Republican Party, more than does now, has to care. I think all those things have to happen. If we wait for the Republicans on their own, that’s never going to happen. It has to be as a result of a whole lot of other things happening around the Republican Party."

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